The Chase For Baseball's Most Impressive Number

Home Runs. RBI. Even today you hear about these crazy things that Bill James invented like 15 years ago and they are now becoming in vogue like an OPS, adjusted or not.

All of these things are nice and great. But if you want to ask me what the most important stat in baseball is, it's the old fashion, no frills attached batting average.

If you hit for a strong average, you get on base. You get on base, you have the ability to score runs. If you hit, you have the ability to knock runs in. The higher the average, to me, the higher the value. A guy with a high career average tells me that I know exactly what I'm going to get day in and day out, year in and year out. Home runs can come and go and RBI can fluctuate if you're on a team that doesn't have people around you or if you're hitting in a certain spot in a batting order (pending it's in the top 5 spots, Edgar Renteria is a .280 hitter, but .330 hitting in the 7 hole, imagine if Al Pujols hit 7).

So to me, average is the ultimate in consistency. Home runs can come and go, but a guy who's going to hit .320 is going to give you a strong presence at the park everyday, and in a season that is 162+ games, I prefer consistency over the flash.

So to me, the quest for .400 is always very interesting. There's a reason that the last guy's name to do it is Ted Williams and names like Mantle, Yount, and Gwynn never accomplished it. It's singly the hardest feat to accomplish in baseball, possibly in all of sports, in my opinion.

So we have Chipper Jones who has been red hot pretty much all year and has been up over .400 and in the .390's for most of the season. Chipper's having a great year and has the other numbers to back up his average to come towards the mid-back end of a really nice career. So the question comes to, can Chipper do this?

Well, here's the plan for hitting .400. I hit .403 or .407 or something like that the summer after my freshman year of high school. Granted, the competition wasn't the best and I was hitting three with Ryan Trembath behind me so I clearly saw good pitches, but I was hitting really well that summer. Bob Conner printed off our stats at the end of the year and I remember studying the game by game log and wondering how I got to the final average that I had. What the sheet looked like was a bunch of 1-3 and 1-4 games with a few multi-hit games sprinkled in.

For a guy chasing the big number, it's every hit that counts. Get them however you can get them. So what's interesting is that Chipper is a power hitter. Can he beat out infield hits? I don't think so. Neither could Ted. But as long he can keep one hit, in any fashion, in the boxscore he has a shot.

I just don't see a guy like that doing it. Someone who can create the intangibles. Someone like Ichiro or Carl Crawford. A guy who hits 1-2 in the lineup who's job it is to create offense for the rest of the lineup. Chipper has one nice luxury and that's he has Mark Texiera hitting behind him. Tex is the key for Chipper's run because you can't pitch around Chipper and if you do, you get to one of the best hitters in the league. I hope Chipper does it, but don't get your hopes up. If he does, he owes Tex a new Porsche.